Limor Livnat and Sofa Landver were grouped with the rest of the 30-member cabinet for their inaugural photo. But Yated Neeman newspaper digitally changed the picture by replacing them with two men. The Shaa Tova newspaper blacked the women out.

Couldn’t they just have put little digital bags over their heads? Wouldn’t that do the job?

11 Responses to “Women should be neither seen nor heard”

I think you mis-represent the reason for the papers’ actions, thus weakening your criticism. The real reasons (noted in the article) are reprehensible enough. There is a prohibition on publishing pictures of women, in order to protect their modesty. This is akin to women being forced to wear burqas to protect their modesty. Disgusting!!

These orthodox groups may also dislike women being in power postitions, but that is not demonstrated here.

I do find it interesting that we can find such fanaticism in any religion, not just our whipping-boy Islam.

Have two stories on this kind of thing, both from the 90s. A photographer friend was doing the pictures for an ultra-orthodox encyclopedia, partly using stock shots from his own collection, partly taking new pictures. He had submitted a picture of a small object which he’d photographed on the hand of his son, then about 13. The shot was rejected because the hand might have been mistaken for the hand of a woman. Oh, and all shots showing crowds of people were taboo, because there might have been women in them.

Actually, that also reminds me of the ad I saw on Jerusalem buses around then for soya meat substitutes. It was a drawing, not even a photograph, clearly aimed at the ultra-orthodox, showing ultra-orthodox children sitting around the table as a pair of disembodied hands serve the product being advertised. The absence of the mother’s body was kind of glaring in the way the thing was composed.

The other thing I remember also involved Yeted Ne’eman, I think. A work colleague who read it told us the paper had published a picture of the female Palestinian politician Hanan Ashrawi and had added a beard and moustache.

What I’m curious about is the identity of the men who replaced the women in this most recent case.

I take back the last question. Looking at the BBC version, the ultra-orthodox picture was cropped at both sides and the men replacing the women were both taken from the missing edges of the same picture.

Gottfried, sure, I realize the stated reasons are to do with ‘modesty,’ but it’s well known that the effect of such restrictions, whatever their intention or motivation, is of course to render women completely powerless, to bar them from all jobs, at the (not rare) extreme to imprison them in their own homes, or in particular rooms in their own homes.